Daniel Bell's theory of the information society - CiteSeerX

A. S. Duff

Napier University, Edinburgh, Scotland, UK

Received 8 May 1998Revised 29 June 1998

Abstract.

Daniel Bell is recognised to be the foremost writer on theinformation society. The paper expounds his writings indetail, showing their development from the 1960s to the1990s. It is argued that his position has always containedthree distinguishable strands or elements: one relating to thepost-industrial information workforce, a second dealingwith information flows (particularly scientific knowledge),and a third concerning computers and the information revo-lution. Bell’s information society thesis is best understood asa synthesis of these elements. His arguments are also evalu-ated. It is suggested that the information economy element isnot satisfactorily supported by the evidence cited and thathis emphasis on theoretical knowledge may also be exces-sive. As regards Bell’s account of information technology, hisposition shifted from a technocratic preoccupation withmainframes to an uncritical enthusiasm for the micro-computer. In spite of such shortcomings, Bell’s syntheticinformation society thesis is the strongest available.

Introduction

Daniel Bell, Professor of Social Sciences Emeritus atHarvard University and currently, in his ‘retirement’,an active Scholar-in-Residence at the AmericanAcademy of Arts and Sciences, is the most illustriousrecruit the information society cause has ever won.This is not a rhetorical opening. A study from the 1970s

employing a ‘reputational methodology’ placed him inthe top ten of the ‘American intellectual elite’, along-side public figures such as Noam Chomsky, JohnKenneth Galbraith and Norman Mailer [1, Ch. 7]. In ourown day, the Times Literary Supplement, one of thechief vehicles of the British intelligentsia, has listedtwo of Bell’s writings, The End of Ideology (1960) andThe Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (1976),among the ‘hundred most influential books publishedsince the war’; they are juxtaposed with such seminaltexts as George Orwell’s 1984 and John Rawls’s ATheory of Justice [2]. A recent critical study describedBell’s work as a central element in the sociologicalcanon, one which ‘infuses the discipline, often guidingthe direction of sociological thought’ [3, p. 172]. Ifneeded, a bibliometric investigation by Blaise Croninand colleagues supplies hard evidence that Bell isindeed a highly cited author, albeit ranking lower (inthe particular time frame used) than several other post-war sociologists [4].

Bell’s contribution specifically to the ‘informationsociety thesis’ – that is to say, very broadly speaking, theclaim that modern nations are undergoing some kind oftransformation into post-industrial information-centredsocieties – has been immense. Few would argue withFrank Webster’s assertion that Bell’s is ‘the most influ-ential theory of the “information society”’ [5, p. 14], orwith the claim of Jorge Schement and Terry Curtis that‘his original interpretation remains the dominant con-text for thinking about information and society’ [6, p. 25]. Furthermore, there is probably no field, aftersociology itself, where it has had a greater impact thanlibrarianship and information science (LIS). A co-citation analysis found that LIS journals over the period1972–1993 cited Bell’s work with great regularity [7].Admittedly, many of these articles will have been byresearchers specialising in information society (IS)studies, but it could well be argued that the averageinformation practitioner also has – or at least shouldhave – an interest in the information society. How, forexample, can professional practice be genuinely reflec-tive if it is unaware of the wider socio-economic milieu

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Journal of Information Science, 24 (6) 1998, pp. 373–393 373

The effect of postings information on searching behaviour

Daniel Bell’s theory of theinformation society

Correspondence to: Dr A.S. Duff, Department of Print Media, Publishing and Communication, Napier University,Craighouse Road, Edinburgh EH10 5LG, Scotland, UK. Tel:+44 131 455 6150/6163. Fax: +44 131 455 6193.

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in which it takes place? Are librarians not supposed tobe among those charged by destiny with ushering in theinformation age or, at least, with being instrumental inthe introduction into society of revolutionary newmedia? In Into the Future: The Foundations of Libraryand Information Services in the Post-Industrial Era [8],Michael Harris and Stan Hannah rightly berate the pro-fession for failing fully to appreciate Bell’s insights,while noting that the information society thesis has suc-ceeded in entering mainstream professional thinkingthrough such concepts as the ‘paperless society’.

The nature of Bell’s position as an information societytheorist is, however, widely misunderstood, both by LIS researchers and more generally. Ignoring the ever-expanding literature which cites Bell, or Bell inter alia,merely as an act of literary genuflection, the scholarlycommentary is largely of one mind: it represents him asan author whose work fits smoothly and sequentiallyinto the ‘information economy’ tradition initially forgedby Fritz Machlup in his classic The Production andDistribution of Knowledge in the United States (1962)[9] and later systematised in Marc Porat’s multi-volumereport on The Information Economy (1977) [10]. Thisreading of Bell guides Harris and Hannah themselves[8], Webster [5], Schement and Curtis [6] and WilliamMartin [11], to mention only some of the more recentmonographs. The aim in the present paper is to venturebeyond such stereotyping by systematically expound-ing and evaluating the nuances of Bell’s position on theinformation society. It will be argued, specifically, thatBell’s theory of the information society is synthetic, a compound of several sui generis elements or strandsor traditions of information society thinking. Certainly,a doctrine of the post-industrial information workforceis crucial, but, in the Bellian oeuvre, it can be shown tobe interwoven with two other important strands: oneconcerning information flows and an ‘informationexplosion’ and the other predicated on computers andan ‘information technology (IT) revolution’. These threestrands are interrelated, but each has a distinctive dis-ciplinary provenance and methodology and makes itsown unique set of claims about the nature of ‘informa-tionisation’ and the information society: their routineconflation has, as a matter of fact, greatly hampered thegeneral progress of information society studies [12].Bell’s work will also be treated here chronologically,rather than, as is usually the case, monolithically orproleptically. That is to say, it will be shown to accom-modate evolving views on the information economy, ITand information flows. Naturally, the critique will focuson Bell’s magnum opus, The Coming of Post-IndustrialSociety: A Venture in Social Forecasting (1973; the

Heinemann edition of 1974 [13] will be cited), but manyother writings, including some recent private corres-pondence [14, 15, 16], will also be highlighted.

Daniel Bell as a soi-disant informationsociety theorist

Logically, the first task is to establish whether or notDaniel Bell is a soi-disant information society theorist.Most commentators do not trouble themselves oversuch subtleties, apparently making the assumption thatbecause Bell is known as an apostle of the informationsociety he must therefore think of himself as one.Exegesis, however, points to a rather more complicatedpicture, revealing that he has actually adopted a rangeof attitudes at different stages in the development of histhought. In his early thinking, in papers such as ‘Noteson the post-industrial society’ (1967) [17] and ‘Tech-nocracy and politics’ (1971) [18], the ‘informationsociety’ does not make an appearance, although thereare tantalising allusions – to a ‘class of knowledgeworkers’, for example [18, p. 4] – which suggest theseeds growing in Bell’s mind. In 1973, The Coming ofPost-Industrial Society was published, but while, asalready noted, this is standardly cited as an authorita-tive source of the information society thesis, a closetextual reading does not in fact disclose any clear-cutappropriation of the term itself:

The question has been asked why I have called this specula-tive concept the ‘post-industrial’ society, rather than theknowledge society, or the information society, or the profes-sional society, all of which are somewhat apt in describingsalient aspects of what is emerging . . . The sense was present—and still is—that in Western society we are in the midst ofa vast historical change . . . The use of the hyphenated prefixpost- indicates, thus, that sense of living in interstitial time[13, p. 37].

These musings occur near the beginning of the book.Later on, he moves closer to employing the term,writing that ‘the post-industrial society, it is clear, is aknowledge society’ [13, p. 212], but since, as will be seen, Bell himself draws a distinction betweenknowledge and information, this cannot be taken aswatertight proof of a conversion to information societynomenclature. Towards the end of his long book, heedges even closer, but again without quite going thewhole way. ‘The post-industrial society’, he states, ‘isan information society, as industrial society is a goods-producing society’ [13, p. 467]. This must be read as astatement of predication rather than essence: Bell was

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saying that ‘being an information society’ or ‘beinginformational’ is an attribute, inter alia, of the post-industrial society, rather than that a modern society is essentially an information society. Surprisingly, it isthe case that nowhere in The Coming of Post-IndustrialSociety can we find the unequivocal avowal with whichBell is commonly credited.

By the time of ‘Teletext and technology: new net-works of knowledge and information in postindustrialsociety’ (1980; first published in 1977) [19], however,Bell was on the brink of embracing the term. Thearticle’s title puts ‘information’ and ‘society’ almosttogether and the text employs a great number of the keywords which have in various ways come to be associ-ated with the information society thesis, including‘computers’, ‘information users’, ‘electronic library’,‘paperless office’, ‘information industries’, ‘informationexplosion’ and ‘information retrieval’. Nevertheless,there is no actual mention in either title or text of the‘information society’ itself. That was to happen, at last,in an article which appeared two years later, ‘The socialframework of the information society’ (1980; firstpublished in 1979) [20]. The title must of course betaken as it stands. However, even here there may be alatent ambiguity, for, while the text makes liberal useof such cognates as ‘economics of information’, ‘infor-mation economy’ and ‘information sector’, references tothe ‘information society’ itself are very rare – hardlysuggesting that Bell was thinking of himself as acommitted, confessing information society theorist.Curiously, an acknowledgement in his collectedpapers, The Winding Passage: Essays and SociologicalJourneys 1960–1980, reveals that ‘Teletext and tech-nology’ was ‘drawn from a larger manuscript on “TheSocial Framework of an [sic] Information Society”,prepared for the Laboratory of Computer Science atM.I.T. in 1975’ [21, p. 355]. This is obviously the samemanuscript that was first published in 1979 under theslightly different title of ‘The social framework of the information society’. It would appear, then, that by1975 Bell had privately decided in favour of using thedescriptor ‘information society’, but also that he wasnot prepared to champion it in the public domain until1979 – and even then only sparingly.

Moreover, it transpires that Bell, having crossed theRubicon, then hesitates. In ‘The world in 2013’ (1987),there is no mention of the ‘information society’,although there is a reference, safely fenced insidequotation marks, to the ‘wired nation’ [22, p. 34]. ‘Thethird technological revolution and its possible socio-economic consequences’ (1989) [23] also manages toavoid the crucial term, and all synonyms, despite its

highly apposite subject. Indeed, Bell affirms there that‘on the axis of technology, both the United States andthe Soviet Union are industrial societies’ ([23, p. 176],italics added), seeming to imply that he had by the late1980s lost sight not only of the information societythesis but also of its post-industrialist matrix. If wemove into the 1990s, there is even less to report of apositive nature. One searches in vain Bell’s major soci-ological paper, ‘Social science: an imperfect art’ (1995)[24], for a mention of the information society. A briefjournalistic piece published in the same year doesallude to the ‘requirements of an information-basedsociety’ [25, p. 8], but the context is a philippic againstNewt Gingrich and the ‘star-trek sociology’ under-girding populist republicanism in the United States: itcan hardly be read as an endorsement of a strong infor-mation society platform. Then in his most recent publi-cation, a preface to a reprint of a futurological workentitled Toward the Year 2000: Work in Progress, Bellreverts to an almost verbatim reiteration of the passagefrom The Coming of Post-Industrial Society quotedabove: ‘Why “post-industrial”, rather than, say, “infor-mation society”, the term that is now loosely used tocharacterize our “new” world?’ [26, p. xv].

Bell was approached privately for illumination onthe matter. ‘No term is wholly satisfactory’, he wroteinitially, ‘and I do not like the term “informationsociety” to the extent that it assumes to be a term that“swallows up” all other dimensions’ [14]. This seemedat first simultaneously to confirm his disenchantmentwith ‘information society’ and to imply that he sees thelabel as a partially accurate societal descriptor; that is,as misleading rather than positively mistaken.However, pressed for further clarification, he referredin his second letter to ‘what seemed to you [the author]a shilly-shallying in the use of the term “informationsociety”’, and he ended with the emphatic and un-ambiguous denial: ‘I don’t think of myself as an “infor-mation society theorist”’ [15].

Thus the question ‘Does Daniel Bell see himself as an“information society theorist”?’ can be answered moreor less straightforwardly in the affirmative only for onebrief period in the development of his thought. For the rest of the time, he either ignores the term, or posi-tively eschews it, or cages it or its synonyms insideinverted commas. William Martin is therefore correct inhis suggestion that Bell is ‘apparently uncomfortablewith the term information society’ [11, p. 2], but whyshould this be the case? Why does Bell prevaricate?Martin does not offer any enlightenment. A very likelyexplanation, however, is that Bell became embarrassedto be associated with the Utopians who have taken

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over the information society camp: the Alvin Tofflers,Tom Stoniers and Yoneji Masudas, to name a few.Frankly, he despises anything that looks to him like‘star-trek sociology’: anything that purports to tell usabout a new society without going through the rigoursof proper sociological analysis. Nevertheless, whateverthe reason for his discomfort, the fact remains that Bell was and is widely regarded as a camp-leader. Onecannot help recalling Karl Marx’s ironic protest, ‘je nesuis pas un Marxiste’. Clearly, no one could have been more of a Marxist than Marx himself; similarly,while Bell may want to resist the label ‘informationsociety theorist’, it remains the case that, objectivelyspeaking, this is what, inter alia, he is. So let us nowproceed to examine the ways in which informationenters into the substance of the Bellian version of the information society thesis, beginning with thatfamous legacy of Fritz Machlup: the informationeconomy.

The information economy

‘We are now, one might say’, Bell had intimated in 1967[17, p. 27], ‘in the first stages of a post-industrialsociety’ – a big, seminal thought which found classicexpression a few years later in The Coming of Post-Industrial Society. Enthusiasts for the informationeconomy always cite this book as a cast-iron source oftheir position. Strangely, however, the text does notactually yield any doctrine of the information sector oreconomy. What it does do, though, is promulgate twointerrelated claims which can be interpreted as beingconducive to the concept of an information economy;namely, a claim concerning a change in the UnitedStates economy from a goods-producing to a serviceorientation, and another concerning the pre-eminenceof the professional and technical class in the US occu-pational distribution. In what follows, Bell’s handlingof these claims is examined with a view to ascertainingwhether or not they are well founded, and whether, ifthey are well founded, they are indeed correctly under-stood as being supportive of information economythinking.

From goods to services

The main source for Bell’s theory of post-industrialismis a short chapter of The Coming of Post-IndustrialSociety entitled ‘From goods to services: the changingshape of the economy’. ‘What is clear’, Bell declares, ‘isthat if an industrial society is defined as a goods-

producing society—if manufacture is central in shapingthe character of its labor force—then the United Statesis no longer an industrial society’ [13, p. 133]. Hisevidence for this strong verdict takes the prosaic formof standard US Bureau of Labor statistics showing agrowth of the service sector and a more or less contem-poraneous decline of the manufacturing sector. It canbe seen from Tables 1 and 2 that whereas employmentin the ‘goods-producing’ sector increased from 10.63million in 1870 to 25.6 million in 1940, and wasprojected to reach 31.6 million in 1980, service employ-ment in the USA went up much more rapidly over thesame period, from 2.99 million in 1870 to 24.25 millionin 1940 and 67.98 million (projected) in 1980. Bell also provides percentage figures – although, irritatingly,only for part of the time frame – and these indicate thatthe goods-producing proportion of the US workforcewent from 51% in 1947 to 31.7% in 1980, while theservice sector went from 49% to 68.4% (Table 3). As the tables make apparent, the service sector is a mixed-bag category which includes not only professional and technical workers but also transport workers andtradesmen, among others. However, Bell plausiblyargues [13, p. 133] that ‘blue collar’ workers in theservice sector are more than offset by ‘white collar’workers within the manufacturing sector, and cites aBureau of Labor Bulletin to the effect that the latterwould reach 34.5% (of manufacturing employment) by1975. He concludes, although without giving his sums,that by 1980 the total manufacturing labour force wouldbe only 22% of the labour force and that technologicaldevelopments such as automation would ensure thatthis figure would continue to decrease: ergo ‘post-industrialism’.

Before going any further, it is important to registerthat while Bell is not quite guilty, as Mark Poster [27,p. 25] alleges, of ‘transforming by the magic of rhetorican assumption into a finding’, it is the case that thisearth-shaking revelation is arrived at after only two orthree borrowed tables and a mere five pages of text, andthat, instead of researching new empirical data, Bellsimply presents a rather tendentious new gloss onroutine statistical sources. Of course, this is in a wayperfectly legitimate. Bell is a social theorist in the grandsense of ‘macrosociologist’ or ‘social philosopher’ and,as such, he is not obliged to go out and gather his ownfacts and figures. However, where he can be faulted isin his sense of proportion. He takes some simple andone-dimensional tables at face value, without in anyway questioning their validity, and yet ventures to resthis whole doctrine of post-industrialism on them. It ispossible that they can bear this weight, that is to say the

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weight of a theory telling us that industrial societies areno more, but frankly he does not even begin to estab-lish the point. This methodological problem has hugeramifications, for it is not as if Bell is an obscure scholarexperimenting with avant-garde ideas. On the contrary,he was, even at the time of The Coming of Post-Industrial Society, a rising star in social thought and itwas inevitable that his views on post-industrialismwould be imbibed by disciples. For the informationsociety theorists among these, at least, the adoption ofBellian post-industrialism has been totally uncritical;the result being that a palpably slender pillar of prima

facie evidence is supporting an inordinately heavysuperstructure of opinion – not least, the canonisationof a new ‘information paradigm’ in LIS [28]. Thisworrying state of affairs should be kept in mind as Bell’scontribution to information economy thinking isprobed further.

Bell proceeds, as Machlup had done, all too briefly,in the penultimate chapter of The Production andDistribution of Knowledge in the United States [9], toreinforce his claim about the reconfiguration of the USgross national product (GNP) by reformulating it interms of what he calls the ‘pattern of occupations’:

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Table 1Sector distribution of employment by goods and services, 1870–1940 (in thousands)

1870 1900 1920 1940

Total 12,900 29,000 41,600 49,860

Goods-producing total 10,630 19,620 23,600 25,600Agriculture, forestry and fishing 7,450 10,900 11,400 9,100Manufacturing 2,250 6,300 10,800 11,900Mining 180 760 1,230 1,100Construction 750 1,660 2,170 3,510

Service-producing total 2,990 9,020 15,490 24,250Trade, finance and real estate 830 2,760 4,800 8,700Transportation and utilities 640 2,100 4,190 4,150Professional service 230 1,150 2,250 4,000Domestic and personal service 1,190 2,710 3,330 5,710Government (not elsewhere classified) 100 300 920 1,690

Source: Historical Statistics of the United States (1820–1940) (from Bell 1974 [13, p. 130]).Note: The totals do not always add up because of small numbers not allocated, and rounding of figures.

Table 2Sector distribution of employment by goods and services, 1947–1980 (in thousands)

1947 1968 1980*

Total 51,770 80,780 99,600

Goods-producing total 26,370 28,975 31,600Agriculture, forestry and fishing 7,890 4,150 3,180Mining 955 640 590Construction 1,980 4,050 5,480Manufacturing 15,540 20,125 22,358

Service-producing total 25,400 51,800 67,980Transportation and utilities 4,160 4,500 5,000Trade (wholesale and retail) 8,950 16,600 20,500Finance, insurance and real estate 1,750 3,725 4,640Services (personal, professional, business) 5,050 15,000 21,000Government 5,470 11,850 16,800

*Figures projected.Source: ‘The US economy in 1980’, Bureau of Labor Statistics Bulletin (1970) (from Bell 1974 [13, p. 131]).

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The changeover to a post-industrial society is signified notonly by the change in sector distribution—the places wherepeople work—but in the pattern of occupations, the kind ofwork they do. And here the story is a familiar one. The UnitedStates has become a white-collar society [13, p. 134].

The evidence for this putatively ‘familiar’ story againtakes the form of standard serial statistics, such as thosein Table 4 showing an expansion of white-collarworkers from 17.6% of the workforce in 1990 to justover 50 % (projected) in 1980. ‘The central occupa-tional category in the society today’, Bell states emphat-ically, ‘is the professional and technical’, made up ofgroups such as teachers, health professionals, scientistsand engineers, and qualified technicians [13, p. 136];but again he does not convincingly demonstrate hispoint. Except for the material reproduced in Table 4, nofurther documentation is supplied. Instead, he hurrieson to speculate about the implications of thesesupposed ‘historic shifts’ for such social groups as thetrade union movement, coloured people (referred torather summarily as ‘the blacks’), women, voluntaryorganisations and – the apple of the 1970s sociologicaleye – the ‘working class’ [13, p. 137f.]. Moreover, all ofthe other chapters of The Coming of Post-IndustrialSociety, with one exception, are in various ways deduc-tions or ruminations which assume rather than aug-ment this empirical base. The exception is Chapter 3,

entitled ‘The dimensions of knowledge and tech-nology’, but, while this chapter does marshal furtherstatistical material, it relates solely to the informationflows and IT elements in the Bellian synthesis (dis-cussed in their own right below) and in no waystrengthens the case for the post-industrial workforce.

This is surely another upsetting finding, for one wouldhave thought that the magnum opus of the father of post-industrialism would contain a much greater proportionof empirical material with which to sustain the informa-tion economy hypothesis. No doubt, information societystudies is not a purely empirical enterprise. No doubt, itmust make room for normative dimensions that havemore to do with ethics and social philosophy than withdescriptive sociology or ‘infometrics’. Nevertheless, thestudy of a putative emergent social formation really doesrequire a significantly higher ratio of empirical to nor-mative argument from that accorded to it in The Comingof Post-Industrial Society, and this rudimentary exercisein textual analysis thus does nothing to dent scepticismabout what was famously lampooned as the ‘marchthrough the sectors’ [29, pp. 210–211]. It is hard indeednot to agree with Victor Ferkiss’s mordant conclusionthat ‘the most charitable verdict that can be passed on theclaim that services, and therefore skill and knowledge,are becoming more important is the Scottish “Notproven”’ ([30, p. 79]; cf. [31, p. 32]).

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Table 3Sector distribution of employment by goods and services (in percentages)

1947 1968 1980*

Total 100.0 100.0 100.0

Goods-producing total 51.0 35.9 31.7Agriculture, forestry and fisheries 15.0 5.1 3.2Mining 2.1 0.8 0.6Construction 3.9 5.0 5.5Manufacturing 30.0 24.9 22.4

[Durable 16.0 14.7 13.3][Non-durable 14.0 10.2 9.1]

Service-producing total 49.0 64.1 68.4Transportation and utilities 8.0 5.5 5.0Trade (wholesale and retail) 17.0 20.5 20.6Finance, insurance, real estate 3.0 4.6 4.7Services (personal, professional, business) 10.0 18.6 21.2Government 11.0 14.6 16.9

[Federal 3.5 3.3 3.0][State and local 7.5 11.2 13.9]

*Figures projected.Source: ‘The US economy in 1980’, Bureau of Labor Statistics Bulletin (1970) (from Bell 1974 [13, p. 132]).

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From services to information

The claims advanced by Bell’s regarding the shift ‘fromgoods to services’ are only half of the ‘story’ of infor-mationisation, the other half being, as Ferkiss suggests,an account of how the (allegedly) expanding servicesector relates to information. Thus the question to befaced now is that of where in The Coming of Post-Industrial Society, if anywhere, information sectorthinking takes over from the service sector thesis. Some elementary investigation is again extraordinarilyrevealing. ‘Information economy’ does not appear inthe book’s index; neither does ‘knowledge economy’,nor ‘information worker’, nor ‘knowledge worker’.Marc Porat’s name is absent of course, because TheComing of Post-Industrial Society preceded the pub-lication of Porat’s research. Fritz Machlup, however, is cited, but, crucially and disconcertingly, his claimsconcerning the production and distribution of knowl-edge in the United States are not endorsed by Bell. Thatis to say, The Coming of Post-Industrial Society rejectsMachlupianism – as will now be demonstrated.

At the start of a key section entitled ‘The structure of the knowledge society’, Bell claims that the post-industrial society is a knowledge society in two senses:first, that theoretical knowledge is pre-eminent; second,that, as he puts it, ‘the weight of the society—measuredby a larger proportion of Gross National Product and

a larger share of employment—is increasingly in theknowledge field’ [13, p. 212]. Playing, as usual, the gen-tleman scholar (although see [32, p. xxii] for an unfor-tunate lapse into vitriolic denunciation of a fellowwriter), he begins by paying respect to Machlup’s‘heroic effort to compute the proportion of GNP devotedto the production and distribution of knowledge’. How-ever, it soon becomes obvious that he regards these‘heroics’ as problematic, as laudable in intention butimpossibly acrobatic in practice. Machlup’s categoriesof knowledge are, he says, ‘broad indeed’ and this is aeuphemistic way of saying that they are far too broad.He expresses surprise that Machlup’s Education cate-gory had included education in the home, the churchand the workplace, that his Communication Media sub-sumed trivia like stationery, that Information Machinesincluded musical instruments and typewriters and thatInformation Services incorporated such familiar indus-trial classes as brokers and estate agents. ‘Any mean-ingful figure about the “knowledge society”’, Bellargues, ‘would be much smaller’, going on to suggestthat it should be restricted to research (but not devel-opment), higher education and the production of intel-lectual property and copyright materials [13, p. 212].

Now these revised parameters can easily be defendedon the grounds of their intuitive acceptability. Theitems on Bell’s list, as opposed to much of Machlup’s

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Table 4Percentage distribution by major occupation group, 1900–1980

Major occupation group 1900 1910 1920 1930 1940 1950 1960 1970* 1980*

Total 100.0 100.0 100.0 100.0 100.0 100.0 100.0 100.0 100.0

White-collar workers 17.6 21.3 24.9 29.4 31.1 36.6 42.0 46.7 50.8Professional and technical 4.3 4.7 5.4 6.8 7.5 8.6 10.8 13.6 16.3Managers, officials and proprietors 5.8 6.6 6.6 7.4 7.3 8.7 10.2 10.0 10.0Clerical and kindred 3.0 5.3 8.0 8.9 9.6 12.3 14.5 16.9 18.2Sales workers 4.5 4.7 4.9 6.3 6.7 7.0 6.5 6.0 6.0

Manual workers 35.8 38.2 40.2 39.6 39.8 41.1 37.5 36.3 32.7Craftsmen and foremen 10.5 11.6 13.0 12.8 12.0 14.1 12.9 13.1 12.8Operatives 12.8 14.6 15.6 15.8 18.4 20.4 18.6 18.4 16.2Laborers, except farm and mine 12.5 12.0 11.6 11.0 9.4 6.6 6.0 4.7 3.7

Service workers 9.0 9.6 7.8 9.8 11.7 10.5 12.6 12.4 13.8Private household workers 5.4 5.0 3.3 4.1 4.7 2.6 3.3 – –Service, except private household 3.6 4.6 4.5 5.7 7.1 7.9 9.3 – –

Farmworkers 37.5 30.9 27.0 21.2 17.4 11.8 7.9 4.6 2.7Farmers and farm managers 19.9 16.5 15.3 12.4 10.4 7.4 4.0 – –Farm laborers and foremen 17.7 14.4 11.7 8.8 7.0 4.4 3.9 – –

* Figures projected.Source: Historical Statistics of the United States (1900–1960) and US Department of Labor Bulletin (1970) (from Bell 1974 [13, pp. 134–135]).

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epistemologically overpopulated original catalogue, aresurely what common sense understands by the word‘knowledge’. This would not entail that Bell cannot bea believer in the knowledge economy or the knowledgesociety. He readily acknowledges the ‘singular’ fact, towhich Machlup had first drawn attention, that theproportion of US GNP devoted to higher education hadincreased dramatically, moving from 3.1% in 1929 to7.5% in 1969 [13, p. 213]. Using data on universityenrolment and the like, he charts the continuing growthof higher education and arrives at the conclusion that‘by the year 2000, the United States will have become,in gross terms, a mass knowledge society’ [13, p. 242].However, higher education was only a very small partof Machlup’s Education category, so what Bell meanshere by a mass knowledge society is a society with a‘mass higher education system’ rather than a societywith the lion’s share of GNP devoted to knowledgework – two quite different ideas. Moreover, it transpiresthat it is only a fraction of this knowledge-producingsector which is really axial to Bell’s conception of the‘knowledge society’. ‘The most crucial group in theknowledge society, of course’, he says, ‘is scientists,and here the growth rate has been the most marked ofall the professional groups’ [13, p. 216]. He suppliesstriking figures indicating that the scientific populationhad increased from 2.7% of the labour force in 1963 to4% in the 1970s. However, professional scientists –‘scientists in the strict sense’ – still comprised only0.74% of the workforce in 1970, which worked out at‘300,000 persons’ [13, p. 229]. Such an argument couldhardly be further removed from Machlup’s thesis thatapproximately one-third of the US workforce wereknowledge workers!

However, at the same time as he drastically reins inMachlup’s parameters, Bell entertains a broader con-ception of the knowledge society. His ‘knowledge class’[13, p. 213], in this more inclusive sense, brings in notonly the creators of research and intellectual propertybut also many personnel from outside science andhigher education, such as the entire ‘professional and technical persons’ category reproduced in Table 5.Teachers are the numerically largest non-miscellaneousgroup, comprising a quarter of professional and tech-nical workers, and, of course, primary and secondaryteachers far outnumber college lecturers. So we havealready moved towards a knowledge sector of moreMachlupian proportions. It is gratifying to note thatlibrarians are also represented: while they do not play aleading part in The Coming of Post-Industrial Societyor, as a matter of fact, in any of the other classic texts of the information society thesis, their status as

information professionals is at least acknowledged. Thesecond most important group, however, is engineers,but at this point the link with the knowledge sector (inany sense) is unclear, for not even unreconstructedMachlupians count all engineers as knowledge work-ers. Moreover, Machlup specifically ruled out dentists,also on the list here. Similarly, Bell is including allnurses: something not even Porat had done. Thus we areconfronted with conceptual disarray. On the one hand,Bell has rejected Machlup’s ‘broad indeed’ parameters,with all their definitional absurdities – while concur-rently endorsing another ‘knowledge class’ which is, in some ways, even more inclusive than Machlup’s. On the other hand, he promotes a knowledge class sodiminutive that it numbers only a few hundred thou-sand talented persons. Sense 1, the knowledge societyas a society with great swathes of the economy givenover to knowledge work, is in tension with sense 2, theknowledge society as a society in which theoreticalknowledge is predominant. Thus we are forced to theunhappy conclusion that Bell is inconsistent in his the-ory of the information society, in so far as this is con-strued as a function of an information or knowledgesector. The case for an information economy is not well made, despite the near-universal reliance on TheComing of Post-Industrial Society as an authoritativesource of that case.

Conversion to Machlupianism

The high-water mark for Bell as an information societytheorist was ‘The social framework of the informationsociety’ [20]. Not only is this the sole work in whichBell portrayed himself explicitly as an exponent of theinformation society, but it is also a paper which hasbeen anthologised – a true sign of quality – and widelycited. It will therefore now be very closely interrogatedwith a view to establishing whether it does, in reality,add anything to the case for an information society, stillunderstood in the present context as a society in whichthe knowledge or information sector is dominant. It hasjust been shown how, in The Coming of Post-IndustrialSociety, Bell had tried to accommodate two quitedifferent and even contradictory senses of information-isation. By the time of ‘The social framework of theinformation society’, a decision seems to have beenmade. He has apparently made up his mind that themost plausible way of making the case for the informa-tion society is not by magnifying the sociological signif-icance of a minute section of the workforce, but byproving that a simple numerical majority of the work-force is engaged in information work: this is the way he

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now wishes to go or, put more tendentiously (andsomewhat colloquially), this is the fashionable intel-lectual bandwagon to which he now, in the late 1970s,wants to fasten his post-industrialism. It will be argued,however, that while ‘The social framework of the

information society’ does report some relevant newmaterial which had not been available at the time ofThe Coming of Post-Industrial Society, it still does notreally succeed in improving the essential intellectualcase for an information workforce.

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Table 5The make-up of professional and technical occupations, 1960 and 1975 (in thousands)

1970 1975*

Total labor force 66,680 88,660

Total professional and technical 7,475 12,925

Scientific and engineering 1,092 1,994Engineers 810 1,450Natural scientists 236 465

Chemists 91 175Agricultural scientists 30 53Geologists and geophysicists 18 29Mathematicians 21 51Physicists 24 58Others 22 35

Social scientists 46 79Economists 17 31Statisticians and actuaries 23 36Others 6 12

Technicians (except medical and dental) 730 1,418

Medical and health 1,321 2,240Physicians and surgeons 221 374Nurses, professional 496 860Dentists 87 125Pharmacists 114 126Psychologists 17 40Technicians (medical and dental) 141 393Others 245 322

Teachers 1,945 3,063Elementary 978 1,233Secondary 603 1,160College 200 465Others 158 275

General 2,386 4,210Accountants 429 660Clergymen 200 240Editors and reporters 100 128Lawyers and judges 225 320Arts and entertainment 470 774Architects 30 45Librarians 80 130Social workers 105 218Others (airline pilots, photographers, personnel relations, etc) 747 1,695

* Figures projected.Source: Bureau of Labor Bulletin (1969) (from Bell 1974 [13, p. 19]).

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We may begin by noting that the title of this article,viz. ‘The social framework of the information society’,has exceedingly strong echoes of the title of the sectionof The Coming of Post-Industrial Society being focusedon above, viz. ‘The structure of the knowledge society’.Malcolm Waters has recently accused Bell of indulgingin ‘replicated publication’ and ‘cut and paste’ tech-niques [3, p. 166] and this is certainly a fine example of both sins. There are, however, some small but highly significant differences in the wording of the twoversions. To start with, in the title of the article, theword ‘information’ has replaced ‘knowledge’ and, aswill become apparent, this nominal change denotes an important material development in Bell’s thought.Secondly, the attitude to Machlup has changed. ‘Thesocial framework of the information society’, like ‘The structure of the knowledge society’, pays homageto the man who ‘made the first efforts to measure theproduction and distribution of knowledge’ [20, p. 516].However, while Bell still says that he sees Machlup’scategories of knowledge as too broad, the crucial caveatin The Coming of Post-Industrial Society regarding ‘any meaningful figure about the “knowledge society”’being ‘much smaller’ [13, p. 212] is now conspicu-ously absent. Thirdly, whereas in the earlier text he hadabruptly dropped Machlup almost as soon as he had corrected him, in the later one he uses him as a step-ping stone to a full-blooded endorsement of the infor-mation economy and society. For, having registeredMachlup’s ‘discovery’ about 29% of 1958 US GNP and31% of the labour force being knowledge-based, Bellgoes on to make the fateful leap, so familiar in informa-tion society studies, to Marc Porat.

‘Porat’s work’, we are told, ‘is the first empiricaldemonstration of the scope of information activitiessince Machlup, but it goes far beyond Machlup’s work’[20, pp. 518–519]. Although Bell mentions some tech-nical respects in which Porat is thought to have outdoneMachlup, notably his use of input–output matrices andsome other relatively sophisticated econometric tools,it emerges very quickly that he, like most other infor-mation society theorists, believes that the ‘most inter-esting and novel aspect of Porat’s work is the definitionand measurement of the secondary information sector’[20, p. 520]. This refers to the internal information activ-ities of organisations which are not directly engaged ininformation work, such as the libraries of pharmaceuti-cal companies or the public relations desks of car man-ufacturing firms. He quotes Porat’s figures, according towhich the primary and secondary information sectorsin 1967 accounted for nearly 50% of US GNP and morethan 50% of wages and salaries, and affirms that ‘it is in

that sense that we have become an information econ-omy’ ([20, p. 521], italics added). Fig. 1, the source ofwhich is given in a footnote as ‘a briefing packet’ thatPorat had disseminated at ‘an OECD conference’ – anegregious example of what librarians call the ‘soft refer-ence’ – divides the workforce into four sectors: infor-mation, agriculture, industry and services. As can beseen, there is no longer any conflation of the informa-tion and service sectors: they are absolutely distinct andthe former has outstripped the latter. Table 6, also takenstraight from Porat, throws Bell’s new perspective intosharp relief by dividing the labour force into just twoclasses: information workers and non-informationworkers. The table presents two sets of statistics: oneusing an ‘inclusive definition’; the other, a ‘restrictivedefinition’. Bell does not explain this distinction norwhy neither set seems to tally with the statistics used inFig. 1, but this does not prevent him from jumping tothe dogmatic conclusion that ‘by 1975, the informationworkers had surpassed the non-information group as awhole’ [20, p. 523].

Like so many other theorists, Daniel Bell has beenentirely captivated by Porat’s claims. This is evidentfrom the tone of his delivery as well as from the contentof his argument. Initially, he keeps things reasonablyobjective, his exposition framed in stock scholarlyphrases such as ‘as Porat points out’ and ‘according toPorat’ [20, pp. 520–521]. However, within a remarkablyshort time, it is no longer ‘according to Porat’ oraccording to any other authority: it is unqualified asser-tion, accepted fact, seasoned history, dogma. Moreover,it has become a subjective matter, one in which Bellseems to feel that he has a personal stake. ‘It is in thatsense that we have become an information economy’([20, p. 521], italics added): we – not the United States,nor the economy, nor advanced societies, but we, thefirst person plural – have become an informationeconomy. If such an epistemic stance were the endresult of a sustained sequence of logic and evidence, itmight be credible or at least creditable, but it is not. Itis based wholly on second-hand figures from Porat andone or two other Machlupians. The lure of Porat’ssensational 50% figure for the US information sectorclearly proved too much even for Harvard’s Henry FordII Professor of Social Sciences (cf. [33, p. 461]). Nowwhatever is believed about the whole Machlupianapproach – and there is much to be said for the viewthat it is riddled with ambiguities and errors [12] –ought we not to be dismayed at the ease with which ithas gained Bell’s imprimatur? Could we not haveexpected a rigorous analysis, rather than what looks like a piece of journalistic adventurism? Was the

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Stage I Stage II Stage III

50%

40%

30%

20%

10%

01880 1900 1920

Year

1940 1960 1980

Agriculture

Industry

Services

Information

Fig. 1. Four-sector aggregation of the US workforce, 1860–1980. Source: Marc Porat, The Information Economy (1977) (fromBell 1980 [20, p. 521]).

Table 6Two-sector aggregation of the US workforce (in percentages)

Year Experienced civilian workforce Total

Inclusive definition Restrictive definition

Information Non-information Information Non-informationworkers workers workers workers

1860 7.0 93.0 4.5 95.5 100.01871 6.3 93.7 4.0 96.0 100.01880 7.7 92.3 5.1 94.9 100.01890 13.1 86.9 10.9 89.1 100.01900 14.7 85.3 10.7 89.3 100.01910 18.3 81.7 11.4 88.6 100.01920 22.0 78.0 13.3 86.7 100.01930 31.4 68.6 17.4 82.6 100.01940 30.7 69.3 18.4 81.6 100.01950 37.5 62.5 24.1 75.9 100.01960 45.5 54.5 28.4 71.6 100.01970 50.6 49.4 36.8 63.2 100.01980* 51.3 48.7 41.7 58.3 100.0

* Figures projected.Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics Bulletins (from Bell 1980 [20, p. 523]).

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‘Machlup–Porat’ school not influential enough as itwas, without being turned into ‘Machlup–Porat–Bell’,an awesome triumvirate against which few would dareto speak? In any case, we must accept that there isnothing in ‘The social framework of the informationsociety’ which augments the empirical case for theinformation economy.

Evidence of regression in recent writings

After such an enthusiastic endorsement of theMachlup–Porat way of quantification, one might expectthat Bell’s subsequent writings would be overflowingwith references to the information economy. However,as was pointed out above, he actually turned his back onthe information society after this article. Two exampleswill suffice here. In ‘The world in 2013’ (1987) [22], apaper the title of which suggests we might be vouch-safed a glowing portrait of a fully-fledged worldwideinformation economy, there is not a single allusion toeither Machlup or Porat or any other author in the infor-mation economy tradition. Post-industrialism is stillthere, but it has reverted to being largely a function ofthe service economy which had been marginalised in‘The social framework of the information society’. Thereis a solitary reference to ‘information-based industries’[22, p. 33], but such industries are now construed asspecies of manufacturing – computers and telecommu-nications are listed alongside pharmaceuticals – clearlyimplying a dissociation from the broader concept of aninformation sector. Similarly, in ‘The third technologi-cal revolution and its possible socioeconomic conse-quences’ (1989) [23], Bell has regressed to the pre-Poratformulations of The Coming of Post-Industrial Society.Dividing societies again into pre-industrial, industrial,and post-industrial, and reaffirming that the post-indus-trial stage is ‘a society of services’, he singles out theUnited States as a country where ‘more than 70 per centof the labor force is engaged in services’ [23, p. 168].There is no mention any more of the term ‘informationeconomy’, nor of the 50% information workforce. Insum, Bell had by the mid-1980s lost his way as an infor-mation society theorist, or rather had lost his way as aninformation society theorist in so far as the informationsociety is predicated on an information economy.

The information flows element

From the beginning – from as far back, at least, as Workand Its Discontents (1956) [34] – the occupational set-up has been Bell’s chief theoretical interest, his main

‘angle’ on the social world, and it is therefore perhapsunderstandable that those who see him as an informa-tion society theorist are prone to categorise him as anexponent of the information economy tradition of infor-mation society thought. This is, however, a very one-sided and therefore misleading view of his position.The present section will show, rather more briefly, thata second important strand can be found in Bell’s writ-ings – one which represents the distinctive ‘informa-tion flows’ approach to the information society thesis.

When Bell began to express interest in ‘the idea of theinformation explosion’ [35, p. 122], scientific knowledgewas entirely what he had in mind. As he put it in hissymposium paper on ‘Technocracy and politics’, ‘whathas now become decisive for society is the new central-ity of theoretical knowledge, the primacy of theory overempiricism, and the codification of knowledge intoabstract systems of symbols that can be translated intomany different and varied circumstances’ [18, pp. 4–5].The importance of theory for 20th-century social devel-opment has been a constant theme in the Bellian oeuvre.The Coming of Post-Industrial Society declared, withsomething of the gusto of an intellectual manifesto, that‘the concept “post-industrial society” emphasizes thecentrality of theoretical knowledge as the axis aroundwhich new technology, economic growth and the strati-fication of society will be organized’ [13, p. 112]. In a later formulation in ‘The social framework of the infor-mation society’ [20, pp. 501–502], Bell memorablyreferred to ‘talented tinkerers’ with their ‘trial-and-errorempiricism’ as a trait of the industrial era, seeing them ashaving been displaced by the knowledge-based technol-ogy of the information society. Today, he can be foundmaking exactly the same point about the ‘new relation ofscience to technology in the centrality of theoreticalknowledge’ [26, pp. xiv–xv].

Several commentators (e.g. [36, 37, 38]) have notedthat Bell allocates a leading role to science, but few, if any, have documented the interesting fact that hedoes not claim the insight as his own. In a revealingsection of The Coming of Post-Industrial Society enti-tled ‘The history of an idea’, Bell singled out from his‘inventory of influences’ an article by the physicistGerald Holton published in Daedalus, house journal ofThe American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Thispaper completely convinced him of ‘the significance oftheoretical knowledge in its changing relation to tech-nology’ [13, p. 35]. Now such an admission must bedisconcerting for information society studies and formuch the same kind of reason that Bell’s heavy relianceon Machlup’s and Porat’s controversial statistics was(or so it was suggested) worrying. Is a single essay, albeit

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one by an eminent scholar in a prestigious journal, asufficient basis for the work it is made to do in Bell’sadaptation? Just as Bell’s views on the informationeconomy are founded in the final analysis on a veryslender empirical case, so his views on the central roleof science are seen to originate in an uncorroboratedpiece of historical interpretation. Intuitively, moreover,it seems as though Bell simply overemphasises the roleof science in 20th-century invention. What, for exam-ple, is Steve Wozniak, the Berkeley drop-out whocreated ‘user-friendly’ computing in a garage labora-tory, if not a shining example of the supposedly extinct‘talented tinkerer’? Conversely, it is debatable whetherscience really was marginal to pre-modern technology.Margaret Rose cites the inventions of the nineteenth-century Cambridge mathematician Charles Babbage as evidence that the dependence of technological inno-vation on theoretical knowledge is not a peculiarity ofthe 20th century ([31, p. 35]; cf. [39, p. 22f.]), and itwould surely not be difficult to find many other suchillustrations.

Nevertheless, if we leave aside its relations with tech-nological change, Bell’s treatment of knowledge per sehas considerable merit:

Knowledge is that which is objectively known, an intellectualproperty, attached to a name or a group of names and certi-fied by copyright or some other form of social recognition (e.g.publication). This knowledge is paid for—in the time spentin writing and research; in the monetary compensation by thecommunication and educational media. It is subject to a judg-ment by the market, by administrative or political decisionsof superiors, or by peers as to the worth of the result, and asto its claim on social resources, where such claims are made[13, p. 176].

The construal of the information explosion in termsof intellectual properties has the advantage of enablingthe ‘exponential rate’ [13, p. 177] of knowledge accu-mulation to be quantified by common yardsticks suchas copyright and patent issues, research journal publi-cation, and so on. Bell cites both Fremont Rider’s influ-ential calculations concerning the doubling of the bookstock of academic research libraries every 20 years andDerek Price’s ground-breaking work on the growth ofthe scientific journal population, and he explains thatsuch phenomena are largely due to the splitting ofscience into more and more fields, each with its owndocumentary apparatus [13, pp. 186–187]. His views onthis matter changed in only one material respect overthe years. In The Coming of Post-Industrial Society [13,p. 181], he believed, or perhaps just hoped, that ‘anygrowth which is exponential must at some point leveloff, or we would reach a point of absurdity’, but, by the

time of ‘The social framework of the informationsociety’, he was attacking the claim that a saturationpoint was imminent and speculating darkly on ‘the endof the Alexandrian library’ – that is, of the kind oflibrary which can house every published work [20, pp. 527–528]. Either way, this is the stuff of routinebibliometrics, although Bell’s formulations are, asusual, distinguished by the eloquent prose in whichthey are clothed, such as the portrayal of the informa-tion explosion as a ‘torrential flood’, or ‘onslaught’, of‘Babel’ [19, p. 57; 20, p. 528].

If, however, the word ‘knowledge’ is to be reservedfor the lofty heights of theoretical knowledge (andparticularly science), where exactly do ordinary infor-mation flows fit into the picture? Bell certainly recog-nised epistemological gradations, as in his article on‘Gutenberg and the computer’ (1985):

Note that I distinguish between information and knowledge . . . Information is news, facts, statistics, reports, legislation,tax-codes, judicial decisions, resolutions and the like . . .Knowledge is interpretation in context, exegesis, relatednessand conceptualisation, the forms of argument. The results ofknowledge are theories: the effort to establish relevant rela-tionships or connections between facts, data and other infor-mation in some coherent form and to explain the reasons forthose generalisations [40, pp. 15, 17].

Such clarifications can be welcomed as an antidote to the unthinking conflations so prevalent in the infor-mation society literature. In effect, Bell is positing ahierarchy in which knowledge, ranking higher thaninformation, requires an analysis or synthesis – an‘effort’ of the mind – of disparate informational units,themselves composed of lower-order data. This com-plies with ordinary language, explaining why, for exam-ple, laymen find it odd when archives or academiclibraries, those supposed temples of knowledge, aresaid to be part of the information industry, or whenresearch scientists are reclassified as information work-ers. However, if this is the case, if a clear-cut distinctionbetween knowledge and information is correct, we are obliged to press Bell as to whether he is theorisingabout the information society or the knowledge societyor both? Unfortunately, we never receive a straightanswer. As was seen earlier, he had mused in TheComing of Post-Industrial Society on the question ofwhether he should call his construct ‘the “post-indus-trial” society, rather than the knowledge society, or theinformation society, or . . .’ [13, p. 37], thereby implyingthat ‘knowledge society’ and ‘information society’ werejust alternative descriptors with little to choose betweenthem. His formal epistemology, however, seems to

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dictate otherwise. We are thus again finding loose endsin the master’s work.

There is another side of the ‘information explosion’:one concerned not with the frontiers of science, noreven, particularly, with information in its precise senseof facts, news and statistics, but rather with the entiregamut of flows passing through society’s media andespecially, of course, the mass media. Most biblio-metric work on the information explosion studiouslyignores the latter, but it is arguable that the totality ofinformation flows, including entertainment and adver-tisements and many other ‘vulgar’ communications,must be accommodated, or at least discussed, in anycogent contemporary social theory of information Afterall, it is not only scientists and white-collar profes-sionals who feel that they are subject to the ‘onslaughtof Babel’, and what most people would mean by this istelevision, radio and other mass media (and nowperhaps also that unique merger of mass and point-to-point communication, the Internet).

It is therefore pleasing to discover that Bell, while hefocuses on the higher epistemological modes, is percep-tive enough to acknowledge, albeit far too briefly, thesocial role of the lower modes. He had intimated in TheComing of Post-Industrial Society that ‘an effort to dealwith comprehensive societal change’ would need toembrace all manner of information flows [13, p. 176],but again we have to wait until ‘The social frameworkof the information society’ for a robust statementregarding this dimension of the information explosion:

The information explosion is a set of reciprocal relationsbetween the expansion of science, the hitching of that scienceto a new technology, and the growing demand for news, enter-tainment and instrumental knowledge, all in the context of a rapidly increasing population, more literate and moreeducated, living in a vastly enlarged world that is now tiedtogether, almost in real time, by cable, telephone and inter-national satellite, whose inhabitants are made aware of eachother by the vivid pictorial imagery of television, and that hasat its disposal large data banks of computerized information[20, pp. 525–526].

Much exegetical energy could be devoted to such arich passage, but the important point for our presentpurposes is that, in addition to the expansion of scienceand its relation to technology, it incorporates thepopular side of the information explosion – as shownby the references to the ‘growing demand for news,entertainment and instrumental knowledge’ and ‘thevivid pictorial imagery of television’. Elsewhere, hegives striking examples of the power of the televisedimage, such as the national broadcast of police dogssnarling at the great Martin Luther King in Birmingham,

Alabama, which resulted in 10,000 sympathisers flyingimmediately to his aid [19, p. 60]. As an illustration ofthe profound significance of communication flows in agrowing ‘information society’, the sensationalisation ofthe civil rights struggle could not be bettered.

Now one would hope that, having thus factored the mass media into the information equation, anevaluation of their social impact, or at least a presenta-tion of some quantitative data and trends, might follow.In the event, they disappear from the Bellian scriptstraight after making their dramatic appearance. Thereason for their marginalisation is not very clear. Belllaments that, with the exception of science, ‘it is almostimpossible to provide any set of measurements to chart[the] growth [of the information explosion]’ [20, p. 526],but this is simply inaccurate. The annual informationflow census and many other reports on johoka shakai(informationised society) reveal that the Japanese, atleast, have for decades been documenting the informa-tion explosion in its entirety (e.g. [41, 42]). Bell’sinterest in Japan is well known – even in retirement, he has written regularly for the magazine ShukanDiamond – so he could, and probably should, havebecome acquainted with this formidable researchprogramme. In another context, Laurence Veysey hasaccused Bell bluntly of elitism, arguing [43, p. 59] thathe ‘derives all his evidence from narrow elites’ andevinces ‘almost no interest in the larger society beyondthese elites’. ‘He casts a wider net’, according to Veysey,‘only in a relatively brief discussion of shifts in theoccupational structure’. However, Bell may not beguilty of the extremely serious charge of snobbery. Hisselectivity is much more likely to be a result of sheerdesultoriness. Like Manuel Castells [44] and otherwould-be encyclopaedic thinkers who aim for the highconceptual ground of information society studies, hecovers too many fields and themes to be able to do themall justice. If non-scientific information flows haveslipped through his ‘net’ soon after being caught, this is disappointing but hardly a legitimate pretext forpolitical diatribes.

It is fairer to conclude that as far as its treatment ofthe mass media is concerned the Bellian synthesis ispromising, but unconsummated. We may or may notagree with Castells’s claim that ‘a few years after itsdevelopment television became the cultural epicenterof our societies’ [44, pp. 332–333], but we are certainlyowed a fuller treatment of television, and other massmedia, than Bell vouchsafes. Just as he overplays theimportance of theoretical knowledge, so he underplaysthe role of other contemporary modes of information.In addition, he fails to articulate a position on how the

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two sides of the information explosion might be related.This is self-evidently a necessary move, because theyapparently point in quite different, even opposite,directions. That is to say, we can easily imagine asociety that is awash with entertainment and other(arguably) inferior modes of information, but which iswoefully short of the higher form of information calledscience; it could indeed very well be argued that this isprecisely what some Western media magnates arecurrently doing to many developing countries by meansof satellite television. Anyway, the hermeneutical issuehere is that, while Bell’s theory is large enough toembrace a plurality of elements of information societythinking, i.e. not just the growth of post-industrialoccupations but also the expansion of informationflows, and again not just scientific knowledge but massmedia flows too, it does not fuse these elements in aconvincing manner. The result is that the Belliansynthesis appears unshapely: obese in some parts andskeletal in others.

The information technology element

In addition to the information economy element andthe two-pronged information flows element, Bell alsoincorporates IT into his theory of the informationsociety. It would be exceedingly odd had he not doneso, since ‘information society as IT-pervaded society’has been by far the most common conception of theinformation society. This popular understanding iscertainly too narrow, given the other elements of infor-mationisation that have been identified above, but anaccount of what in professional parlance is called ‘ITdiffusion’ is nevertheless one core aspect of any cogentinformation society thesis. As will now be seen, Belldoes duly present his own account of the social role ofcomputers and telecommunications. His writings arenow examined with one question to the fore: did hisviews stay the same or evolve significantly as the infor-mation revolution developed?

Bell has always been deeply impressed by tech-nology, seeing it not only as an instrument of ratio-nality, but also, like art, as ‘a soaring exercise of thehuman imagination’ ([45, p. 20]; cf. [46, p. 324]). He has been theorising information technology, amongother species, from the beginning. In one of his firstessays on futurology, ‘The study of the future’, he cited,albeit non-committally, predictions of a ‘new, auto-mated economy’ featuring a robotised service sector[35, pp. 121, 130]. By the time of The Coming of Post-Industrial Society, he was ready to make his

own pronouncements, claiming, for example, that ‘thedevelopment of modern economics . . . has beenpossible because of the computer’ [13, p. 24]. Indeed,according to its subtitle, this book constituted ‘aventure in social forecasting’, and economic and demo-graphic forecasting are precisely the kinds of activitiesfacilitated by information processing. Bell regardscomputers as integral to ‘the rise of [the] new intellec-tual technology’ [13, p. 27], that is to say informationtheory, cybernetics, decision theory, game theory,utility theory, maximim strategies, stochastic pro-cesses, and the like. All such techniques he deems tobe peculiar tools of the modern mind and they all sharethe attribute of being necessarily computational, in thesense of requiring, for the mega-calculations – ‘feats’[13, p. 30] – they involve, the services of machine intel-ligence. The colossal number-crunching of computermodelling could even help us, in Bell’s optimistic prog-nosis, to ‘realize a social alchemist’s dream: the dreamof “ordering” the mass society’ [13, p. 33].

However, it is essential to realise that the computersbeing talked about in these earlier writings had nothingto do with personal computers or the information revo-lution. The references to robotics, forecasting andeconometrics indicate that the role which IT was play-ing in Bell’s thinking at this stage was an esoteric oreven technocratic one. What, after all, could be moreesoteric than high-tech ‘social alchemy’, a formularesembling an unholy amalgamation of Fabianism andfreemasonry? At any rate, Bell was clearly not envisag-ing the spread of ‘user-friendly’ computing, or the‘microcomputer revolution’, or ‘informationisation’ inits popular sense. In line with the state-of-the-art ofcomputing at the time at which The Coming of Post-Industrial Society was written, he had in mind, basi-cally, mainframes and their characteristic academic andgovernmental applications. Now there is no a priorireason why a theory of the information society shouldnot take this kind of approach, but we should be underno illusions that such a theory would be very differentfrom the common conception of the information societyas a ‘wired-up world’. The former, predicated on main-frames, yields a ‘top-down’, primarily qualitative,thesis emphasising the economic and social signifi-cance of a narrow base of powerful IT; the latter, predi-cated on microcomputers, yields a much morequantitative, ‘bottom-up’ thesis stressing the wide dis-tribution of (relatively) cheap IT.

It might be objected that Bell’s position was neces-sarily mainframe-oriented up to the mid-1970s sincethe personal computer had not yet been unleashed onthe world. This is true and an author should never, of

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course, be read out of context. Nevertheless, there weremany intimations of popular informationisation evenin the early 1970s and the harsh truth is that Bell wasnot, despite his self-styled vocation as a sociologicalseer, particularly alive to them. Indeed, he often delib-erately depreciated the incipient information revolu-tion, as when he stated in the Introduction to TheComing of Post-Industrial Society that ‘in terms of tech-nology, probably more substantial change was intro-duced in the lives of individuals in the nineteenthcentury by the railroad, steamship, electricity, and tele-phone, and in the early twentieth century by radio,automobiles, motion pictures, aviation, and high-speedvertical elevators, than by television and computers,the main technological items introduced in the lasttwenty-five years’ [13, p. 42]. Lifts have changed theworld more than computers: there is little ammunitionthere for the kind of message that many IT-intoxicatedinformation society theorists are nowadays propa-gating! Bell admittedly does refer in the same passageto a ‘revolution in communications’, but this is quicklydiluted by being mixed in with another revolution,namely that taking place in transportation systems.

Such statements cannot be dismissed as aberrations.In the central chapter of the magnum opus, devoted to‘The dimensions of knowledge and technology’, Bellputs the computer alongside atomic energy and jetengines as one of the innovations which lend credi-bility to cliché-ridden talk of a ‘constantly acceleratingrate of technological change’ [13, pp. 191–192]. How-ever, the main thrust of his treatment of technology inthis chapter turns out to be of a general nature, withnothing to suggest that he regards the diffusion of IT as especially noteworthy. Indeed, the sole specificmention of an IT-related process, automation, is onewhich positively militates against the kind of mindsetespoused by today’s information society theorists:

No large-scale society changes with a flick of a wrist or thetwist of a rhetorical phrase. There are the constraints of nature(weather and resources), established customs, habits andinstitutions, and simply the recalcitrance of large numbers.Those, for example, who made sweeping predictions aboutthe radical impact of automation, based on a few spectacularexamples, forgot the simple fact that even when a newindustry, such as data processing or numerical control, isintroduced, the impact of industries with sales mountingquickly even to several billion dollars is small compared to an economy which annually generates a trillion in goods[13, p. 211].

With its repudiation of the notion of a radical impact,this passage would automatically disqualify Bell fromthe IT-as-revolutionary camp: it belittles the social

impact of IT and mocks those who were predicting acomputerised leisure-filled Utopia. A later footnotesingles out Alvin Toffler’s best-seller Future Shock astypical of the self-deceived claims of the informationrevolutionaries. Computers, Bell counters, have hadcomparatively little effect on the ‘daily life of individ-uals’ [13, p. 318]. Thus, unpalatable though some mayfind it, the textual evidence indicates that Bell was not,in 1973, ready to ascribe great epoch-making powers to IT, and The Coming of Post-Industrial Society is not really therefore a legitimate benchmark text fordogmatic claims concerning the (technological) infor-mationisation of society. That, however, was to changedramatically as the 1970s unfolded.

The first genuine microcomputer (actually stilldescribed as a ‘minicomputer’), the self-assembly Altair8800, was advertised for sale in Popular Electronics inJanuary 1975; Apple II appeared in 1977, followed byIBM’s personal computer (PC) in 1981. This was thecritical period for the ‘information revolution’, a phrasewhich was, and often still is, used synonymously with‘microcomputer revolution’. We might therefore expectthe IT strand in Bell’s post-Coming writings to beconsiderably more salient and, as these opening sen-tences from ‘The social framework of the informationsociety’ demonstrate, such expectations are abundantlyfulfilled:

In the coming century, the emergence of a new social frame-work based on telecommunications may be decisive for theway in which economic and social exchanges are conducted,the way knowledge is created and retrieved and the characterof the occupations and work in which men engage. This revo-lution in the organization and processing of information andknowledge, in which the computer plays a central role, hasas its context the development of what I have called thepostindustrial society [20, pp. 500–501].

The information revolution had evidently nowgripped Bell’s sociological imagination. The two mainspecies of IT, namely telecommunications and infor-mation processing, are implicated in a scenario (the‘may be’ simply means that it is not quite a formal pre-diction – a trademark Bellian caveat) in which a newsocial structure has come forth, and the computer,rather than sharing the limelight with other outstanding20th-century technologies, now plays the, rather thanmerely a, central role in the post-industrialist drama.The definite article is apposite, for Bell goes on to statethat ‘technological revolutions, even if intellectual intheir foundations, become symbolized if not embodiedin some tangible “thing”, and in the postindustrialsociety that “thing” is the computer’ [20, p. 509].Reification, not to say iconisation, of the ‘micro’ has, of

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course, become integral to technological discourse onthe information society.

However, perhaps the most distinctive feature inBell’s new understanding is that a merging of technolo-gies has taken place. While information media could inthe past be divided into print-on-paper on the one handand non-print media like telegraph, telephone, radioand television on the other, now the technologies andrespective industries are coming together. ‘The reallymajor social change of the next two decades’, he writes,‘will come in the [communications] infrastructure, asthe merging technologies of telephone, computer, fac-simile, cable television and video discs lead to a vastreorganisation in the modes of communication betweenpersons’ ([20, p. 533], italics added: no ‘may be’ now).Following Antony Oettinger, Bell calls this process‘compunications’, but it cannot be distinguished fromthe kind of ‘convergence’ thesis encountered in any IT-based theory of the information society in the 1990s. Byall accounts, the age of the stand-alone gadget is gone.

Tom Forester, one of the leading anthologists ininformation society studies, had introduced his reprintof ‘The social framework of the information society’with the remark that ‘Bell has developed his ideasfurther in the light of the microelectronic revolution’[20, p. 500]. Margaret Archer, too, has recently opinedthat ‘by 1980 Daniel Bell had . . . joined in the celebra-tion of the new axial principle—computer-assisted“theoretical knowledge” universalized by telecommu-nications’ [47, p. 107]. The truth is even starker. Bell’sthinking had actually made a major new departure,taking him deeply into the territory of the informationrevolutionaries, perhaps even into what TheodoreRoszak [48] calls ‘the cult of information’. This claim issupported in particular by two papers from the late1980s. Bell’s vision of ‘The world in 2013’ assigns tocomputers a leading role in a ‘third technological revo-lution’, and employs without demur, albeit in invertedcommas, the Utopian buzz word, ‘wired nation’ [22, p. 34]. Then, in ‘The third technological revolution andits possible socioeconomic consequences’, a key paperwhich commentators have tended to ignore, it becomesvery clear that by this time Bell was able – as he hadnot been only a decade and a half earlier – to believe inthe triumph of personal computing:

The industrial revolution produced an age of motors—some-thing we take for granted. Motors are everywhere, from auto-mobiles to boats to power tools and even household devices(such as electric toothbrushes and electric carving knives) thatcan run on fractional horsepower—motors of one-half andone-quarter horsepower. Similarly, in the coming decades, weshall be ‘pervaded’ by computers—not just the large ones, but

the ‘computer on a chip’, the microcomputer, which willtransform all our equipment and homes. For automobiles,appliances, tools, home computers and the like, microcom-puters will operate with computing power of ten MIPS (mil-lions of instructions per second) per computer [23, p. 167].

‘We have’, as the opening paragraph puts it, ‘passedinto the crucial period of diffusion’ [23, p. 164]. Suchpassages could have been authored by an Alvin Toffleror a Yoneji Masuda, or indeed by a Bill Gates. Socialalchemy has transmuted into home informatics. It isobvious, in other words, that Bell was at last embracinga thesis about the transformation of social life – thedaily life of the average individual – as a result of the spread of ‘compunications’.

However, ‘The third technological revolution and itspossible socioeconomic consequences’ contains the lastrobust piece of evidence for an IT element in Bell’sinformation society thesis. In ‘Social science: an imper-fect art’, he writes that ‘the fundamental sociologicaldifficulty today, if one seeks to build theory, is theradical break-up of the institutional structures of society—in the economy and the polity—because of technol-ogy and telecommunications, and the changes in scalein the arenas where all these activities are played out’[24, p. 19]. Telecommunications are obviously stillimportant to him, but technology has gone back to beinggeneric. There is nothing in the article to imply that hesees information technology in particular as being axialto the construction of ‘theory’. Except for a passingallusion to IBM – in its capacity, rather ironically, as amanufacturer of mainframes as opposed to microcom-puters [24, p. 20] – there is nothing of either the spirit orthe letter of the ‘information revolution’. The apparentdisenchantment was confirmed in recent private corres-pondence with Bell, when he wrote [15]:

Information becomes important in three ways: as a controlsystem in the coded direction of production; as an orderingprinciple for scheduling, and other recording functions, as inmanagement information systems; and in communications, asin the Internet. But important as these changes are, the moreimportant elements in a society remain the character of ourknowledge systems, the conflicts in the polity and thechanges in culture.

Computer-mediated communication (CMC), manage-ment information systems (MIS) and the Internet: theseare now the sum total of Bell’s computerised society,the only non-negligible applications of what he hadcalled, at the height of the information revolution, an‘analytical engine’ destined to ‘transform’ the socialframeworks of the 20th century [20, p. 509]. An evenmore emphatic message was given in a final letter [16]:

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The idea of ‘information society’ is a sub-set of the techno-logical dimension of ‘society’ and often subordinated to largerorganizational structures in the way an information tech-nology officer in a corporation is subordinated to othermanagerial officers in the firm.

He would not have spoken this way a few yearsearlier. IT now has no special purchase on the nature ofsociety. It has been subordinated, downsized, relegatedto a middle-ranking position in the Bellian scheme ofthings.

Such retracations are not unwelcome. It is, of course,a very large issue and one to which no more thansummary justice can be done here, but there aregrounds for believing that much contemporary writingon the information revolution is likely to face a harshjudgement from the historians of the future. For is therenot something prima facie counter-intuitive, evenabsurd, about the claim that what the industrial revo-lution took (at least) 200 years to achieve, namely atotalistic, epoch-making, transformation of ways of life,the information revolution is about to achieve in 20 or30 or perhaps 50? Would it not be wiser to wait and seewhether the information revolution will yet acquititself in such a way as to remove lingering doubts overits authenticity and uniqueness and diffusiveness?Given that the core technology in this putative revolu-tion, namely the microcomputer, is, on the face ofthings, a classic mass-produced, standardised indus-trial product, should we not be wary, for the time beingat least, of ‘post-industrialism’ in this sense? Themajority of commentators think otherwise, but therehave always been sceptics who have maintained thatthe information revolution can be explained perfectlysatisfactorily as a phase of mature industrialisation and that the information society should therefore beunderstood, in Ian Miles’s memorable phrase, as the‘meta-industrial society’ [49, p. 927]. If Miles and thislike-minded minority are correct, then Bell temporarilylost his sense of perspective. If they are right, then bycomparing the information revolution with the indus-trial revolution, Bell was simply demonstrating that hetoo had become seduced by the feverish technologicalrhetoric characteristic of the late 1970s and 1980s – aserious lapse for a leading social theorist. These areonly suggestions. No final verdict can be given on thematter yet, but surely the fact that, as we have just seen,Bell himself has now renounced strong informationrevolutionary rhetoric is an indication of his ownmisgivings?

The question remains of whether Bell’s views on the information revolution were woven naturally andcohesively into his thought or merely stuck onto it

syncretistically, like a new deity in Hindu theology.The least charitable interpretation would be to accusehim of naked opportunism, to allege that he was notparticularly concerned with IT until it became presti-gious to be considered an authority on the subject, andthat he later distanced himself from it as popularpassions faded. This is Frank Webster’s line, althoughWebster also acknowledges that the background ofbreathtaking microcomputer proliferation was a miti-gating feature. ‘In such circumstances’, Bell’s mostpersistent critic concedes, ‘we can sympathise with hisjumping on the bandwagon when he too began to adoptthe fashionable language of the “information revolu-tion”’ [5, pp. 30–31]. It is hard to deny that Bell’saccount was largely reactive. He was for too longstrangely lacking in insights into the technological andsocial trajectories of computing. Sometimes, at least,his work leaves the impression, as does so much infor-mation society punditry by others, of a hastilyexecuted, ad hoc response to the acceleration of infor-mationisation. There is no doubt also that, as a formerjournalist, it is in Bell’s nature to write for effect. He hasalways been, as Michael Miller puts it, ‘a victim of hislaudable desire to be relevant to contemporary discus-sions’ [39, p. 18]. For example, he would not havepublished almost exclusively in wide circulation non-specialist periodicals if he were seeking purely toassemble a scientifically impeccable theory. Never-theless, Bell’s interest in IT is genuine and profoundand, however many inadequacies his analysis contains,it should not be lightly dismissed, nor tarred with thesame brush as that of his epigones. On the contrary, ifwe take Bell’s writings as a whole and resist the temp-tation to focus exclusively on the hyperbolic materialwhich provided such easy pickings for the informationrevolutionaries (and targets for their critics), we canlearn much from his evolving understanding of thesocial role of IT.

Conclusion

Bell is incontrovertibly the ablest, as well as most influ-ential, theorist of the information society. This paperhas not encompassed every aspect of his position, pre-scinding, for example, from his account of the nature ofthe relations between IT and society (i.e. the vexed issueof ‘technological determinism’) and from his doctrine of the three ‘realms’ of society and their relative auton-omy. Nor has it mentioned his theory of the ‘just meri-tocracy’ as the appropriate mode of social democracyfor post-industrial societies (articulated in the Coda of

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The Coming of Post-Industrial Society). The aim hasbeen severely self-disciplined and forensic: to identifyand evaluate the textual evidence for seeing Bell as arecruit to the information society thesis. To this end, ithas sought to show his changing attitude to the descrip-tor ‘information society’, to explicate what exactly heunderstands by the concepts behind the nomenclature,to chart the main influences on his thought and, finally,to appraise some of the ways in which he both movedthe information society thesis forward and furtherentrenched the errors and ambiguities to which thatthesis is prone.

In particular, the paper has assiduously disaggre-gated Bell’s thought, interpreting it as a compound ofthree strands, elements or versions of the informationsociety thesis – in a sense, as a synthesis of three hetero-geneous ‘information society theses’. This reading ofBell as a synthesist is a construal, an interpretationwhich is being placed upon the evidence (cf. [50, p. 9]).It has not been argued that he is a self-conscious syn-thesist. Mid-way through our correspondence, thismethodological issue was brought into focus by thefollowing questions:

Do you agree that there are in fact several ‘information societytheses’: one that, following Machlup, talks about informationwork and sectors; another that is interested in the ‘informa-tion explosion’; and a third that emphasises the diffusion ofinformation technology (e.g. Nora and Minc, to whose reporton ‘informatisation’ you contributed a preface [51])? In yourown writings on the information society you seem to endorseall three variants: is this the case and, if so, could you say aword or two about how your position—a synthesis?—relatesto each variant?

Bell completely sidestepped the query in subsequentcommunications, perhaps implying that he had notreally thought things through in the way suggested.Nevertheless, this is, as the foregoing critique hasendeavoured to prove, the most fruitful approach to hiswritings on information and society.

In the final analysis, the question of how Bell seeshimself is less important than that of whether, objec-tively speaking, he actually produced a successfultheory, and the answer to this one has to be negative.There are inherent methodological problems with someof the elements that make up the synthesis. This is espe-cially true of what was called the information economyelement, where Bell relies far too heavily on dubiousglosses on second-hand statistics. Moreover, his theoryfails as a synthesis, self-conscious or otherwise. Itsweakness lies not at all in its range, but rather in itsshape: by failing to assimilate each of the elements

properly, it leaves some parts of the theory overblownand others underdeveloped. Discussing some otherareas of Bell’s thought, Laurence Veysey arrived at asimilar criticism:

A major trouble with Bell is that too many things for him turnout to be primary. It is as if he cannot write about a particularsubject without being pulled into a declaration that it isabsolutely central to the whole society so long as he ischoosing to fasten his attention upon it. This means weshould distrust Bell’s capacity to achieve a sense of propor-tion as he views any particular subject [43, p. 53].

Veysey alleges that ‘much of this may come down tothe realization that Bell does not seem to care to gothrough the pains of editing himself’ [43, p. 57]. Someadditional evidence has been presented above whichindicates that more self-editing would indeed havebeen of benefit to Bell’s cause. Now it is not idlenesswhich stops him from staying in any field long enoughto do a proper workmanlike job. It is scientific curiosityor perhaps, at worst, what Bell himself called his ‘rest-less vanity’ (cited in [52, p. 33]). Whatever causes liebehind the partial conceptual disarray, however, theunavoidable conclusion must be that he fails to producea streamlined synthesis. Bell was always the informa-tion society theorist most likely to succeed. Since, in theend, even he falls well short of the goal, one is forced towonder whether the information society thesis will everbe vindicated. Furthermore, if information scientistsare, as we so often claim, responsible for leading theway into an information-centred future, perhaps weneed to pay more attention to the profound method-ological and conceptual issues broached above.

Acknowledgements

I wish to thank Professor Bell for entering into dialoguewith me by letter during 1996, and later, on the occa-sion of the conferring of his honorary doctorate atNapier University (10–11 July 1997), face-to-face. I amalso obliged to him for sending an unpublished paperread to the American Sociological Association, TheBreak-Up of Space and Time: Technology and Societyin a Post-Industrial Age (1992). While this informs theanalysis as ‘background’, I have honoured his requestthat, because he intends to revise it for subsequentpublication, its arguments should not be cited.

Thanks are also due to Dr Andrew McDonald ofCraigmillar Community Information Service, Edinburgh,and Dr David Duff of Aberdeen University, among othersfor helpful comments on a draft of the present paper.

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[50] C. Steinfield and J.L. Salvaggio, Toward a definition ofthe information society. In: J.L. Salvaggio (ed.), TheInformation Society: Economic, Social and StructuralIssues (Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, London, 1989),pp. 1–14.

[51] S. Nora and A. Minc, The Computerization of Society: AReport to the President of France (MIT Press, Cambridge,MA, 1980). First published as L’Informatisation de laSociété (La Documentation Francaise, Paris, 1978).

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Erratum notice

24 (4) 1998 pp. 231–240. Article ‘Duplicate detection and record consolidation in large bibliographic databases: theCOPAC database experience’ by Shirley Anne Cousins. Page 231, correspondence details, telephone number shouldread +44 161 275 6037 and fax +44 161 275 6040.Page 232 line 22, ref [4] should be on page 233, column 2, line 22 after “practice”.Page 240 line 21, ref [6] should be in column 1, line 18 after “procedures”.Page 240, a new ref [7] should replace ref [6] in line 21, and be added to the list of references thus:

[7] K. Coyle, Technical report no. 6. Rules for merging MELVYL(R) records. Revised June 1992. [ftp:ftp.dla.ucop.edu/pub/techreport/mergingrec.txt].

The publisher apologises for these omissions.

3156 JIS 24/6 01 DUFF B 28/10/98 10:47 am Page 393



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